Ivanka Trump's Brand Is in Crisis as Shopper Boycott Takes Hold
Calls to boycott Ivanka Trump's fashion brand are taking hold.
Critics are urging shoppers to stop spending money at the many retailers that carry her namesake brand, including Amazon, Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Dillard's, Marshalls, and Neiman Marcus.
The anti-Ivanka Trump movement was launched in mid-October by brand strategist Shannon Coulter.
It started gaining steam last week when a woman describing herself as a lifelong Nordstrom customer posted an open letter to the department store demanding that it stop selling items from Trump's $100 million clothing and accessories line.
"The hate speech directed at African Americans, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, LGBT people, and women by the Trump campaign is unacceptable and does not seem to represent Nordstrom's values," she wrote, according to a copy of the letter that she posted on Twitter. "Yet Ms. Trump continues to defend it, and Nordstrom continues to defend her."
The letter's author, whose Twitter handle is @shewhovotes, asked her followers to share the letter if they agree. She tagged the tweet with the hashtag #GrabYourWallet, which has become a rallying cry on social media to boycott Trump's brand.
As of Monday, the #GrabYourWallet campaign had made more than 119 million impressions on Twitter, which include retweets and "likes," The Wrap reports.
Some celebrities have even shown support for the boycott, including Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen, writer Joyce Carol Oates, Valerie Bertinelli, Lucy Lawless and Oscar nominee Don Cheadle.
There's some evidence that the negative publicity has started impacting Ivanka Trump's brand.
Searches for her products online soared between June and October, Fast Company reports citing data from ShopRunner. During the first week in October, searches for her products were up 335% over April 2016.
But search traffic has taken a nosedive since the start of the boycott.
"We certainly see in the data, in the last week or two, very much timed with the boycott, the decline in interest, but hard to say whether that's just a temporary blip," ShopRunner CMO Angela Song told Fast Company.
The New Yorker declared in late October that "the darker forces of her father’s political campaign are threatening to ruin everything" for her, and that she is fighting to "salvage her brand, which is built around young professional women and working mothers, two groups who appear to be recoiling from her father’s Presidential candidacy in large numbers."
But Ivanka Trump dismissed the boycott on "Good Morning America" last week, saying many women still support her.
"The beauty of America is people can do what they like, but I'd prefer to talk to the millions, tens of millions of American women who are inspired by the brand and the message that I've created," she said.
Nordstrom didn't respond to a request for comment.
However, the company posted this message on Twitter: "As a retailer we work with thousands of vendors. It would be difficult for us to filter out who and what they choose to support and then determine the ones we agree or disagree with. Offering these or other products doesn’t imply we're taking a position."
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